“The first to plead his case seems just, until another comes and examines him” (Prov. 18:17).

In a majority report, white people came to the shores of the United States and oppressed the Native Americans, stealing their land and disrupting their way of life.

Not so well known is the minority report. Some white people came to the shores of the United States and befriended the Native Americans, seeking to treat them with justice and sharing the gospel with them, helping them build churches and opening up new chapters on Earth and in heaven for these Native Americans.

Americans usually learn the majority report in school textbooks or from Hollywood. But a few faithful believers lived out the less-publicized side of the story. Practicing Matthew 28:18-20 and Micah 6:8, this lesser-known story starts with John Eliot and the family of Thomas Mayhew as they developed missions to New England Indians not long after the Puritans started coming to Boston.

Reformed Presbyterians did not come to America until several years after the Puritans, but they joined in the noble tradition of seeking to offer the gospel to and justice for Native Americans. The RP Church sought to reach Indians in what was originally the Oklahoma territory, laboring from 1889 until the 1960s in a barren area southwest of Oklahoma City.

The church’s 1871 Testimony recognized the national sin of oppression of Indians—long before many Americans came to a sense of regret for these injustices. The Testimony confesses: “The history of the government has been largely one of oppression and injustice towards its aboriginal and colored people, and of iniquitous distinction of caste.”

The Oklahoma mission was a scriptural response to the broader failure of the nation. It provided for physical needs while addressing the Indians’ spiritual need to bow down to Jesus as Savior and Lord. The Synod Minutes from 1896–1905 are written in a sober tone, with careful record keeping in the spirit of Ezra 8:34. RP pastor and psalm-singing leader Charles McBurney also wrote a solid and factual master’s thesis on the Indian mission in 1948.

Church services attracted 150–200 people in the late 1890s, and about half were Indian (mostly Comanche, but some Apache, Kiowa, and mixed background). Indian church membership was less, about 30–50.

The mission provided education to about 50 students a year. The school seemed to be the heart of the ministry. Students memorized Scripture, learned the Shorter Catechism, and collected offerings for the church’s mission in Syria (giving the scholars some vision for spreading the gospel to the ends of the Earth). The amount of memory verse work was quite encouraging: 528 verses in one year for a student in 1898; 6,994 verses for the whole school that year. Isaiah 55:11 comes to mind as a promise for this kind of discipline.

Behind these sober reports, the Holy Spirit was at work in some special ways. A communion service in 1898 brought 250 Indians from some distances. They camped for several days, like the great Cane Ridge revivals in Kentucky in 1800 and the traditional RP society communion seasons in Scotland.

The mission faced serious spiritual warfare from the tribal medicine men, with their appeals to spirits and devils. Other challenges, sometimes bringing church discipline, were gambling, drunkenness, drug abuse (peyote), and polygamy.

A Mexican member of the congregation was murdered and mission superintendent William “W.W.” Work Carithers offered this eulogy (suggesting this ministry’s fruitful impact): “He was a quiet, peaceable man in his life, and the universal testimony was that the murder could not have been committed because of a quarrel. The influence of the Spirit in applying the truth made a great change in his life: in the kindliness with which he cared for his wife and family; in the comforts he gathered around his home; and in the readiness with which he would engage in religious exercises.”

The Synod reports suggest a well-balanced approach to this work done in the spirit of the book of James—helping the Indians with felt needs, such as education and medical care. They learned farming from Kansas farmer John Robb. Carithers’ sister served as a field matron, visiting new mothers in their homes, helping them learn household and parenting skills (similar to nurse-family partnerships today).

Though concentrating on this group of Indians, the mission also sought to reach out to other groups, including Apaches and the Lime Creek Indians in another area. According to Charles McBurney’s thesis, Indian elder delegates came to Synod meetings.

Another hopeful note from these Synod Minutes was the healthy and fruitful cooperation of church and state. The RP doctrine of Christ’s kingship over church and state can lead to conflict, if one side tries to dominate the other. (When King Charles I tried to run the church in Scotland, the sorry result was a civil war in England and Scotland.) But the doctrine should lead to a less dramatic cooperation, as leaders in both spheres look to Christ and God’s Word to find their complementary responsibilities. For example, a wise police officer can charge a man with public intoxication but take him to the local rescue mission instead of the jail, which benefits the church and the state. In Oklahoma, the government agents helped the mission with land for farming and other physical benefits, which the mission could put to good use for kingdom advancement. “The relation of the missionaries to the representatives of the Government has been harmonious and pleasant,” states the 1897 report. “In a number of instances they have indicated their appreciation of the work being done.”

While the school closed in 1916, due to cost and the opening off a nearby public school, the missionaries continued their work with school children by taking turns with the other missions in teaching religion classes at the public school. Clearly the mission had a good name in the West. These missionaries got much done in the Lord. A critic might suggest that more should have been done, just as critics of William Wilberforce did (saying that he should have gone on and ended child labor in England, as his successor in Parliament, Anthony Ashley, was able to do). But praise the Lord for what was accomplished! The mission budget always seemed to be frugal, about $5,000 in the 1890s and about the same in the 1960s.

The Puritan Indian missionaries like John Eliot and the Mayhew family had a commendable consistency in their walk with Christ, as demonstrated by how their children and sometimes grandchildren and even great-grandchildren followed in their footsteps. We see a similar pattern in the Cache Creek Mission. Joining W.W. Carithers in this work were a sister and a daughter and son-in-law. Charles McBurney married a granddaughter of Carithers, giving him access to key correspondence and records that enabled him to write a thorough story of the mission. Judy Pockras, wife of Belle Center, Ohio, RP pastor Phil Pockras, had a great-great uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wilson, who joined the Oklahoma mission in the early years and then went on to Los Angeles, where Robert Wilson was one of the founding elders of the Los Angeles RPC.

Christ has worked extensively through families in the Reformed Presbyterian Church across the generations, and this Deuteronomy 4:9 pattern seems to be part of the Oklahoma mission.

Zechariah 4:10 sums up a good response to the Cache Creek story: Who “hath despised the day of small things”? In the years when the church was seeking to amend the Constitution, perhaps an equally important work was this small but fruitful attempt to honor Christ as King and to bring the gospel and the love of Christ to the poor and needy in a disappearing frontier of the nation.

Let us beware of chronological snobbery. We look back on our ancestors and sometimes wonder why they could not see the injustice that appears so obvious to us now. If we do see something more clearly today, it is in large part because of faithful pioneers like those in the Oklahoma mission. They applied God’s Word in new ways of outreach and were consistent in their application of Scripture, swimming against the cultural consensus of their times.

We take their contributions for granted today, but we can learn from their dedication and example. We too should be willing to apply God’s Word with much personal sacrifice in our own time.

Russ Pulliam | Second (Indianapolis, Ind.) RPC